‘Like a Beggar’ by Ellen Bass
Posted on April 23, 2014 by Isaiah Vianese in Poetry, Reviews
Ellen Bass’ new poetry collection, Like a Beggar, exhibits the compassionate voice and celebratory worldview on display in her previous books The Human Line and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Mules of Love. Yet, Like a Beggar has a stronger focus on narratives than her earlier collections.
Some of the best poems in the book are patiently paced and vibrant with details, like “Women Walking,” which follows the conversation of two women on a stroll. As the characters in the poem discuss growing older, we discover small details about their lives: the speaker worries her partner finds her belly unattractive, and her friend asks, “Wouldn’t it be enough to be just fat or just old and dying?” The poem articulates worries we may have in common with the two women by bringing us into the moment-by-moment movement of their conversation. Bass achieves this by describing both the women’s banter and their walk in beautiful detail:
There’s a wall of sunflowers, each splendid
full-seeded head fringed with yellow flames,
and on the wide lawn ahead the yoga class unfurls supple arms toward the sun.
The aroma of whole-wheat bread baking mixes with the scent of salt and kelp.
Because we experience the walk with the characters, it is easy to empathize with their concerns; we, of course, are part of their dialogue, if only as observers.
All of the poems in the collection are alive with description. “What Did I Love,” which some readers may know from its publication in The New Yorker, revels in the carnage and effort of slaughtering chickens. Bass guides the reader through the process of killing the birds, cleaning their bodies, and packaging the carcasses. Though the subject matter may initially seem grim, the poem succeeds as a meditation on the pleasures of work. Similarly, “Another Story” explores the importance of storytelling as a way to fend off despair by taking joy in small details, like the salad the speaker makes while she tells her mother-in law about the time her partner coddled a baby bat between her breasts after it fell from the chimney.
The book also works in the tradition of Pablo Neruda’s odes (such as his “Ode to My Socks), which use careful observation of mundane objects and events to arrive at greater concepts. Bass employs odes to explore domestic comfort (“Ode to Repetition”), atheism (“Ode to the God of Atheists”), and the beauty of the female body (“Ode to Dr. Ladd’s Black Slit Skirt”), among other topics. These poems tackle imposing ideas by grounding them in the physical world. For example, in “Ode to Boredom,” the poet talks about a vacation in a quiet Italian town during which her family labored to keep occupied:
A farmer poured acorns for pigs
that squealed and snuffled. A shaggy horse
stood in a muddy corral. Once
we watched his bright penis emerge.
We bought clay and a tin of watercolors,
fashioning a miniature sty, painting the pigs hot pink,
rice grains filling their trough. I was bored
for the first time since childhood.
One night we sat in the lobby of the only hotel,
watching cartoons in Italian. How the days opened,
space widening between hours.
Bass has such a clear eye for specifics that she transforms pedestrian topics into individual and lived-in art objects.
What allows the poems in Like a Beggar to endure is that they praise the world in which we live, including its beauty and hardships. As the poet writes in “Relax”:
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles in a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh, taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
The poem acts as an appropriate thesis for the collection as a whole, which digs into the dirt of the everyday. Ellen Bass pays witness to our small but remarkable lives, and that reverence makes her book a success.
Like a Beggar
By Ellen Bass
Copper Canyon Press
Paperback, 9781556594649, 7o pp.
March 2014
‘The City of Palaces’ by Michael Nava
Posted on April 20, 2014 by Katherine V. Forrest in Fiction, Reviews
Two splendid novels, both brilliantly written and researched to unimaginable depth, explain a very long silence from two of the very best fiction writers among us. (more…)
‘Dust Devil on a Quiet Street’ by Richard Bowes
Posted on April 20, 2014 by Keith Glaeske in Reviews, Speculative
“A writer’s life only becomes clear to him after he writes it,” declares Richard Bowes near the end of his Dust Devil on a Quiet Street. Part memoir, part tell-all, part homage to the city he has lived in for forty-plus years, and part secret history of that same city, Dust Devil is more than just an examination of Bowes’s life, although it definitely has the quality of someone looking back at his life and trying to make sense of it, both to us, and to himself. (more…)
‘All the Heat We Could Carry’ by Charlie Bondhus
Posted on April 17, 2014 by Christopher Soden in Poetry, Reviews
All the Heat We Could Carry is a compelling, fierce, vivid, yet sometimes understated and curiously dry in tone, collection of poems by Charlie Bondhus, describing life as a gay soldier in Afghanistan. Bondhus cultivates a theme of heat: sustained, transferred, endured, enjoyed or suppressed, whether in the desert, the bedroom, the front porch, or the end of a pier. His decision to cloak volatile, profoundly disturbing content may seem counter-intuitive, but is actually dead-on, as this kind of material demands a kind of nonchalance. Otherwise it might feel manipulative and purple. Overblown. There is a quiet precision to Bondhus’ poems, like sealing something dangerous, despairing or grotesque in a glass jar. (more…)
‘Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story’ by Rebecca Coffey
Posted on April 13, 2014 by Sara Rauch in Fiction, Reviews
Almost everyone, interested in psychology or not, knows who Sigmund Freud was, but I’d venture to guess that fewer people, unless they’ve studied psychoanalytic child psychology, know who Anna Freud was. I certainly didn’t, until Rebecca Coffey’s new book, Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story (She Writes Press), landed in my lap. (more…)
‘Daughter of Mystery: A Novel of Alpennia’ by Heather Rose Jones
Posted on April 13, 2014 by Rita Salner in Romance, Speculative
Daughter of Mystery: A Novel of Alpennia, is a wonderful book of intrigue and romance. Margerit Sovitre is an orphan who lives with her overbearing uncle, his wife, her sister, and their son. She is the god-daughter of Baron Saveze, a man who has ancestral lands and great wealth. (more…)
‘Look Who’s Morphing’ by Tom Cho
Posted on April 11, 2014 by John Bavoso in Fiction, Reviews
Look Who’s Morphing (Arsenal Pulp Press), Australian author Tom Cho’s debut book, bills itself as “a fresh, hilarious, and dazzlingly contemporary collection of micro-fictions that explore the slipperiness of identity, race, and gender.” While this may be the case, it reads more like a dream journal being kept by someone with an overactive imagination—in the most somewhat-exhausting-but-mostly-interesting-and-entertaining way possible. (more…)
‘A Map of Everything’ by Elizabeth Earley
Posted on April 8, 2014 by Theodosia Henney in Fiction, Illustrated
Elizabeth Earley’s novel, A Map of Everything, which contains supplemental illustrations by artist Christa Donner, explores the aftermath of a tragedy and its effects on a family. The story is told in fragments, several of which focus on the experiences and whereabouts of the family’s five children, though the primary protagonist is Anne, the youngest. When Anne’s sister June is involved in a car accident that leaves her with severe physical disabilities as well as permanent traumatic brain injury, Anne begins down a path marked by neglect, self-destruction, abuse, and addiction. The novel not only pieces together a portrait of Anne and her family before and during the event, but shows their progression over the course of two decades, tracing the ways in which their lives continue to be affected by a single traumatic event.
‘Paris Is Burning’ by Lucas Hilderbrand
Posted on April 7, 2014 by Bradford Nordeen in Nonfiction
In the latest contribution to Arsenal Pulp Press’s “Queer Film Classics” series, Lucas Hilderbrand sets his sights on that legacy object, the fabulous and enduring cultural phenomenon that is Paris Is Burning. One of the most successful documentaries ever made, the 1991 film follows Harlem Drag legends like Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Willi Ninja and newcomers like Octavia Saint Laurent and Venus Xtravaganza as they compete in Harlem drag balls, dream of fame and struggle as queer people of color in the bustle of pre-Giuliani New York City. Hilderbrand, whose scholarship includes articles on Todd Haynes’ Barbie bootleg, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and an analysis of “The Art of Distribution: Video on Demand,” embraces the rich cultural text with signature breadth and an impassioned personal narrative. (more…)
‘I Loved You More’ by Tom Spanbauer
Posted on April 6, 2014 by Rachel Wexelbaum in Fiction, Reviews
Before delving into any of Tom Spanbauer’s books, it is best to take note of the two central principles of his school of Dangerous Writing:
1) What makes writing dangerous is something personal, very small, and quiet… to go to parts of ourselves where there is an old silence, where it is secret, where it is dark and sore… to go to where we’ve never gone before, writing down what scares the hell out of us. Eventually to the very foundation and structure of how we perceive, and in this investigation, we can challenge old notions of who we are.
2) When you meet someone for the first time, be kind, and look them in the eye. Everyone has a battle raging inside of them.
—Spanbauer, quoted at a Dangerous Writing Workshop, Esalen Institute, June 2007
In I Loved You More, Spanbauer deftly executes these two Dangerous Writing principles. Compared to his previous novels, one senses that I Loved You More was the most difficult and painful for him to write. For the first time, Spanbauer expresses his personal struggle coping with HIV/AIDS through narrator and main character Ben Grunewald. It is also the first book where Spanbauer addresses bisexuality. Unlike Spanbauer’s traditional naïve, sweetly bashful protagonists, Ben is an unapologetic sixty-year-old who admits that sometimes he hates people who don’t have to worry about dying. While Ben is no angel, Spanbauer gives him grace and soft eloquence, with a touch of burnt tongue, that will make the reader want to be kind and look him in the eye while he reminisces.
Spanbauer’s main characters typically fall in love with people who are often seen as culturally “taboo” in some way—an African American drag queen in The City of Shy Hunters, a Native American man accused of pedophilia in Now is the Hour. While out and proud Ben Grunewald cannot resist telling the story of his first love and blood brother in Idaho, Native American Ephraim Owlfeather, Ephraim remains in Idaho while Ben moves to New York City. It is there, while working odd jobs and taking writing classes, that Ben encounters striking—but straight—author and writing teacher Hank Christian. Spanbauer’s writing advice, inherited from his mentor Gordon Lish, now is channeled through the macho, working class Italian Christian, who shouts “Latinate!” when Ben tries to hide behind fancy words when describing the complexities of love, sex, and relationships. No good old Anglo-Saxon word will do for Ben when he wants to talk about attraction; only “propinquity” will do. Propinquity delights and challenges; it can lead to pleasure or trouble. Ben spends most of his life negotiating his propinquity for men as well as women.
Ben has three “men” inside of him who guide his behavior—the macho Big Ben, the anxious Little Ben, and the Running Boy when he is overwhelmed by fear. Hank, while he never says so outright, is guided by similar spirits. Both Ben and Hank must negotiate all the ins and outs of gay and straight male etiquette, from figuring out who holds the door open for whom to how to dress when you go to a gay bar. While Hank is willing to step over some heteronormative boundaries with Ben, he is still primarily attracted to women, and so Hank and Ben bounce in and out of their relationship. Hank marries, has a son, and gets divorced, while Ben meets different men, engages in casual sex and substance abuse with them, and gets sick. At the lowest point in his life, Ben meets Ruth, a beautiful woman who cares for him while he is sick. Ben falls in love with Ruth. Then Hank, dying from cancer, shows up again. How will it all end up? Totally gay Ben Grunewald opens and closes his looping narrative on love, relationships, and survival with this simple equation:
More than likely, you’re like me and think that something like this could never happen to you. That you could love a man, then love a woman—two extraordinary people, two unique ways of loving, from different decades, on different ends of the continent, and what happens is something you could never in a million years have planned. There you are the three of you, dancing the ancient dance whose only rule is with three add one, if not, subtract. If three doesn’t find four, three goes back to two.
—Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More
Bisexuality is one of the last taboos in the LGBT and heterosexual worlds. Religion, the media, and the American legal structure only recognize committed relationships between two people, with the assumption that each person is only attracted to one sex or the other, but not both. Although Kinsey had established long ago that a significant percentage of Americans are bisexual, those who identify as bisexual are often condemned as “experimenters” who are incapable of commitment, or “not really queer” if they are engaged in monogamous heterosexual relationships. A clumsier writer would clutter up a story about a gay man simultaneously in love with a “straight” guy and a woman with denial and angst; Spanbauer simply unpacks imagery, events, and dialogue without judgment, allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions. If anything, I Loved You More provides an empathic view of bisexual relationships as the most natural in the world, perhaps the most generous expression of love and shared strength for the survival of humanity.
Further Reading:
Tom Spanbauer. (2014).
Wexelbaum, R. (2008, Spring). Dangerous writing. Lambda Book Report, 16 (1/2), 44
Wexelbaum, R. (2009). “Tom Spanbauer.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States, Volume 2, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson.
I Loved You More
By Tom Spanbauer
Hawthorne Books
Hardcover, 9780986000782, 468 pp.
April 2014
